As a Java developer who has over the last couple of years taken a tour of the different RIA frameworks, I find Silverlight fantastic.
Flash, if you're a designer is awesome. But personally, as a developer, I found the environment pretty basic compared to server side java. Flex Builder is kind of crappy(at least as of 6 months ago), lacking many features even free Eclipse-based tools provide (such as meaningful refactoring). And the programming api outside the gui toolkit is only skin deep. And, which really makes me sad, no eval() in the runtime.
Meanwhile, with.Net/Silverlight, you've got oodles of libs, a pretty decent IDE, tons of great books, and REALLY NEAT projects like the DLR(which is a way to get eval() in this environment, and a whole lot more). Plus, eventually, you'll be able to run full SL apps on your phone with windows mobile 6 + Symbian. For this working developer whose resources are constrained by time and money, this sounds like a real coup.
Love Microsoft or hate it, Moonlight/Silverlight is something devs should be excited about.
I also hope Adobe learns from it for future versions of Flex/Flash, continuing to drive innovation.
Back in the old days(and still now) is that most compilers compiled to a intermediate language-often C. So what this really means is that (sometime soon)we'll be able to write in any language that can be compiled down to C...so Lisp, C++, Objective-C, welcome to the browser!
Wrong. A smart college kid will choose a career that will allow them to pay off their student loans in a reasonable amount of time, own a decent home, spend time with their wife/husband, be ethical, live a life outside of work, and *lastly* be fun enough to do day in, day out.
Personally, writing software isn't my favorite thing to do in this world, and if money wasn't a concern I'd be a professional musician. But given the money and the outlet for creativity offered by this career, writing software ain't a bad choice.
It would be a real bummer for me if the status quo, thanks to an influx of cheap foreign labor(who seem to have pay far less than us Americans for a university education, I'm willing to bet ) ceased to be true.
Really, the only thing that is actually needed to make it perfect( for smalltalk, my true love ) so far as I know is to make code hotswapping a guaranteed thing. But with this feature, the status quo won't suck. And goodbye slow reflection.
from what I've heard, VB for.NET has been really changed around, such that there will be alot of compatibility problems between VD 7(or whatever the current version is) and VD for.NET. And as far as C++ support(as well as support for other languages),.NET will support a microsoft'ed version of the language(and most likely some version different from the (mangled) version they have today...
It could be Utah GLX...it is still beta. Even when I compile and run simple examples(such as the ones provided with Mesa) sometimes it crashes. I know it's not the code, as I've been doing OpenGL development(for fun and pleasure) for the last year and a half, and the code looks clean. And I'm pretty sure it's not me-I've configured it according to the advice on FreeBSD.org and Utah GLX's home page.
either way, IRIX's OpenGL support rocks hardcore compared to XF86 3.6...maybe not 4 though as I haven't installed it yet.
Now that I've got harware opengl support, and the ability to run a window manager that is as beautiful and functional and simple as 4dwm on my FreeBSD box, all of a sudden my SGI Indigo2 looks like it might not be my best box anymore...it almost makes me cry. But chances are, I'm wrong. while my FreeBSD box might be able to look like an IRIX box, it certainly won't perform like one. For one, running an OpenGL app on XF86 is risky--they seem to bring down XF86 like 1 out of 4 times, and my IRIX box (of course) never fails to perform the required task(albet at a more civilized pace, at least until I upgrade it)...
as an executive member of my college radio station, I'd argue the fact that there isn't any good music. If anything, there is MORE good music now than ever before. Thanks to technology and decreasing costs of really good equipment, almost everyone can make an album that sounds as good as one produced by WB or the other major labels.
Therefor, the question isn't that there isn't good music, just that no commerical top 20(which all commercial radio stations are now, by the way...) radio station is willing to play them. They are only willing to play something "safe," something that falls clearly within the genre, something that sounds similiar to another band that has proven sucessful.
If you want to hear the good music, now you have to turn to college radio. One I would suggest is the U of Minnesota's Radio K--they broadcast via realaudio, and you can check them out here
not to nitpick, but the current federal govt(you know, that one established with this constitutions, in 1789), was put in place as a response to the prevous federal government, the Articles of Confederation, which was really weak. It gave the federal government no power, and if we had kept it, I'm sure we wouldn't be as well off today.
But more on the subject, I don't understand why you state-righters think that giving the states more power will somehow lead to better protection of civil liberties. There isn't a tie between the two. In fact, as the federal government has gained power(thanks to FDR and LBJ, JFK), people have gained even more rights and protections....thanks to the federal government's ability to coerce the states(like Mississippi, Alabama, etc)
to sum it up, Federalism(the balance of power between the states and the federal government) isn't tied to civil liberties...and if it is, federal power is good for increasing civil liberties.
You know, after reading the NYT piece, I'm pondering if Microsoft knew that this info had been obtained, and in an effort to hurt Oracle, told their fronts to intentionally dump those laptops, thus making Oracle look no better than themselves.....
this, it seems to me, would be a very MS-like tactic.
This post (sort of) brings an interesting point into focus-the idea of economics prevents corps from becoming all powerful, extremely wealthy entities-the corporations need the common people to have enough money to live, otherwise we can't buy their products.
Thus the idea that corporations and capitolists want the common people, or the proletariat, to be poor holds little water. Marx predicted that corporate power would be a threat almost 150 years ago. He was wrong-if you read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," or any other book discussing the situation of the masses and compare what they had to what we have now, you will realize that corporate abuse and power are on the downswing.
The masses will never see a future like the one Katz describes. We won that battle a long time ago-the corruption we see now is nothing. And the corporation cannot exist without a populace with money-they have no purpose.
ugh, you can get a 180mhz r5000 O2 for like 1500. And an r10000 Indigo 2 with impact graphics for less than a grand. Of course, these are used market prices(check out comp.sys.sgi.marketplace for more examples)--so they don't come with the service contract or anything, but I've found it really isn't necessary if you have enough patience to figure stuff out(which isn't that difficult to figure out anyway...). MIPS technology has come down alot in the last two years-enough so that a poor student like me can get a really decent Indigo 2 for less than 800 bucks(and I bought my machine last august, and prices have even gone down since then...)
just thought I'd correct you a little bit. I really hate it when SGIs are considered too expensive--because they're not. Not if you consider you get IRIX(which in my opinion is way better than linux on the desktop), plus a 20 inch monitor, plus a really well made, cool looking machine.
1)patents and copyrights are a mechanism in which helps owners of products and methods and such to inforce a contract.
2)the right to inforce a contract is a clause in the US Constitution(and also many other countries). While this idea of an enforcable contract was put in by very rich men, it in the long run has helped the general consumer. Why? Because unless companies or individuals or even musical groups can protect their work, they will never even attempt the work. Medicines that require millions of dollars of research to perfect would never be invented. The computer you are typing your comment on would never have been invented. Even Open Source Software wouldn't be around if we did have computers(it depends on the ability to enforce a contract as well). Hell, you would never have even heard of Metallica--the company that has a record contract wouldn't exist, because 1) they couldn't enforce the contract they have with Metallica, and 2) they wouldn't have exclusive rights to distribute that music, so they couldn't make any money.
to say that copyrights or patents aren't good things is stupid. sure, there are instinces where patents or copyrights shouldn't have been granted, but to say that they are inherently bad for consumers isn't correct.
I don't think it would have to be that inefficient. It could be implemented efficiently by using keys.
all they would have to do is set it up so when joeblow saves a file, Windows RC5's it(or uses some other inexpensive one-way cipher). Then it looks for something with the same key value. If it finds something with the same value, it saves it as a symlink. If not, it saves it as a "real" file, and puts the key into the db that can be searched whenever another file is saved.
2) when joeblow opens a file, the OS just has to intervine and perform some type of test to see if the file is actually a symlink. if it is, find and return the real file. if not, just return the real file.
I don't think it would be that hard-or even that expensive.
As opposed to lacking creativity, and feeding off an unrealistic dream of gaming/Lara Croft sex adolation, this episode was poking fun at the sexually deprived 25 going on 14 year old gamers who get their jollies off of sillicone as well as silicon.
Chris Carter has done this in mode than one episode-for example, the COPS episode could easily be taken as a parody...they followed all the conventions of a COPS episode-hookers, topless skinny men, and the men wearing(without which no COPS episode would be complete) wife-beaters.
I think the one where Michael Milkin guest starred, where Mulder and His character switched bodies would also qualify as this type of episode.
This entire episode was just a parody of campy Xena/Japanese Animation/Married With Children(which I actually thought was funny sometimes..)/Natalie Portman/Britney Spears/Me so horney type of games/tv/music/movies.
While this isn't totally on topic, I feel I this is as appropriate a time as any to say this.
As an owner of a MIPS-based sgi, I don't think sgi is for linux/open source as much as they'd like us to think. I believe this for several reasons-for one, even on their older mips based sgis, they don't seem to want linux(with a working X) to be running on them. Also, beyond Jesse and the kernel dump analyzer tool, nothing has come out of them. Secondly, As several people have pointed out, it really is kind of stupid for sgi to sell linux-based supercomputers(see the other posts to clarify).
I hate to say it, I think sgi is using Linux as a advertising thing...
for those who say that this demonstrates sgi's deep commitment to Linux, think twice...look at the status page, and you'll see that it hasn't been updated in months! So no progress in the MIPS version of Linux.
just a little rant and raving to make me feel better...I've been really frustrated with my IRIX box the last couple months:-(
What you are talking about is Amdahl's Law, which states that there is a upper bound for the speedup achievable by any parallel device, due to the inherently sequential nature of problems the machine is running...
so yes, there is some limit to the amount one problem/program can be parallelized(sp?). However, I suspect that each of those machines is running more than one simulation at one time, so overall they are each somewhat efficient in their use of the processors n'stuff
Slashdot Mirror
This is all being built next to Oslo's Fjords....
No wonder Slartibartfast won an award for them!
As a Java developer who has over the last couple of years taken a tour of the different RIA frameworks, I find Silverlight fantastic.
Flash, if you're a designer is awesome. But personally, as a developer, I found the environment pretty basic compared to server side java. Flex Builder is kind of crappy(at least as of 6 months ago), lacking many features even free Eclipse-based tools provide (such as meaningful refactoring). And the programming api outside the gui toolkit is only skin deep. And, which really makes me sad, no eval() in the runtime.
Meanwhile, with .Net/Silverlight, you've got oodles of libs, a pretty decent IDE, tons of great books, and REALLY NEAT projects like the DLR(which is a way to get eval() in this environment, and a whole lot more). Plus, eventually, you'll be able to run full SL apps on your phone with windows mobile 6 + Symbian. For this working developer whose resources are constrained by time and money, this sounds like a real coup.
Love Microsoft or hate it, Moonlight/Silverlight is something devs should be excited about.
I also hope Adobe learns from it for future versions of Flex/Flash, continuing to drive innovation.
Back in the old days(and still now) is that most compilers compiled to a intermediate language-often C.
So what this really means is that (sometime soon)we'll be able to write in any language that can be compiled down to C...so Lisp, C++, Objective-C, welcome to the browser!
Err...how long/violent are the wakes on larger aircraft?
I'm guessing that following a 747 in a Cessna or a Sailplane is a pretty bad thing, almost as bad as a collision.
Can anyone with any qualifications back this up or am I wrong?
Totally off topic, but props:
Colo(u)r me impressed....nice Replacement reference.
Paul Westerberg, chief writer for the 'Mats lives in my neighborhood.
Wrong. A smart college kid will choose a career that will allow them to pay off their student loans in a reasonable amount of time, own a decent home, spend time with their wife/husband, be ethical, live a life outside of work, and *lastly* be fun enough to do day in, day out.
Personally, writing software isn't my favorite thing to do in this world, and if money wasn't a concern I'd be a professional musician. But given the money and the outlet for creativity offered by this career, writing software ain't a bad choice.
It would be a real bummer for me if the status quo, thanks to an influx of cheap foreign labor(who seem to have pay far less than us Americans for a university education, I'm willing to bet ) ceased to be true.
the treatment of this condition required the use of stem cells? and if the treatment was administered in utero?
explode...maybe....or would he fall asleep and stop breathing for now apparent reason?
thanks for reading the flamebait.
Actually, there is more than a *slight chance*.
The jvm will support(in java 7) a great deal of what is necessary via this jcp:
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=292
it's approved and everything!
Really, the only thing that is actually needed to make it perfect( for smalltalk, my true love ) so far as I know is to make code hotswapping a guaranteed thing. But with this feature, the status quo won't suck. And goodbye slow reflection.
Apparently, you've never heard of John Madden.
no, that's mice. I think the person who did this report may be confused. Or under their control, in their cruel little experiment called Planet Earth.
or at least I hope so.
from what I've heard, VB for .NET has been really changed around, such that there will be alot of compatibility problems between VD 7(or whatever the current version is) and VD for .NET. And as far as C++ support(as well as support for other languages), .NET will support a microsoft'ed version of the language(and most likely some version different from the (mangled) version they have today...
It could be Utah GLX...it is still beta. Even when I compile and run simple examples(such as the ones provided with Mesa) sometimes it crashes. I know it's not the code, as I've been doing OpenGL development(for fun and pleasure) for the last year and a half, and the code looks clean. And I'm pretty sure it's not me-I've configured it according to the advice on FreeBSD.org and Utah GLX's home page.
either way, IRIX's OpenGL support rocks hardcore compared to XF86 3.6...maybe not 4 though as I haven't installed it yet.
fud me
quatto
Now that I've got harware opengl support, and the ability to run a window manager that is as beautiful and functional and simple as 4dwm on my FreeBSD box, all of a sudden my SGI Indigo2 looks like it might not be my best box anymore...it almost makes me cry. But chances are, I'm wrong. while my FreeBSD box might be able to look like an IRIX box, it certainly won't perform like one. For one, running an OpenGL app on XF86 is risky--they seem to bring down XF86 like 1 out of 4 times, and my IRIX box (of course) never fails to perform the required task(albet at a more civilized pace, at least until I upgrade it)...
quatto
#####IRIX4LIFE#####
as an executive member of my college radio station, I'd argue the fact that there isn't any good music. If anything, there is MORE good music now than ever before. Thanks to technology and decreasing costs of really good equipment, almost everyone can make an album that sounds as good as one produced by WB or the other major labels.
Therefor, the question isn't that there isn't good music, just that no commerical top 20(which all commercial radio stations are now, by the way...) radio station is willing to play them. They are only willing to play something "safe," something that falls clearly within the genre, something that sounds similiar to another band that has proven sucessful.
If you want to hear the good music, now you have to turn to college radio. One I would suggest is the U of Minnesota's Radio K--they broadcast via realaudio, and you can check them out here
mike kohout
not to nitpick, but the current federal govt(you know, that one established with this constitutions, in 1789), was put in place as a response to the prevous federal government, the Articles of Confederation, which was really weak. It gave the federal government no power, and if we had kept it, I'm sure we wouldn't be as well off today.
But more on the subject, I don't understand why you state-righters think that giving the states more power will somehow lead to better protection of civil liberties. There isn't a tie between the two. In fact, as the federal government has gained power(thanks to FDR and LBJ, JFK), people have gained even more rights and protections....thanks to the federal government's ability to coerce the states(like Mississippi, Alabama, etc)
to sum it up, Federalism(the balance of power between the states and the federal government) isn't tied to civil liberties...and if it is, federal power is good for increasing civil liberties.
your friendly poly sci major
quatto
You know, after reading the NYT piece, I'm pondering if Microsoft knew that this info had been obtained, and in an effort to hurt Oracle, told their fronts to intentionally dump those laptops, thus making Oracle look no better than themselves.....
this, it seems to me, would be a very MS-like tactic.
This post (sort of) brings an interesting point into focus-the idea of economics prevents corps from becoming all powerful, extremely wealthy entities-the corporations need the common people to have enough money to live, otherwise we can't buy their products.
Thus the idea that corporations and capitolists want the common people, or the proletariat, to be poor holds little water. Marx predicted that corporate power would be a threat almost 150 years ago. He was wrong-if you read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," or any other book discussing the situation of the masses and compare what they had to what we have now, you will realize that corporate abuse and power are on the downswing.
The masses will never see a future like the one Katz describes. We won that battle a long time ago-the corruption we see now is nothing. And the corporation cannot exist without a populace with money-they have no purpose.
ugh, you can get a 180mhz r5000 O2 for like 1500. And an r10000 Indigo 2 with impact graphics for less than a grand. Of course, these are used market prices(check out comp.sys.sgi.marketplace for more examples)--so they don't come with the service contract or anything, but I've found it really isn't necessary if you have enough patience to figure stuff out(which isn't that difficult to figure out anyway...). MIPS technology has come down alot in the last two years-enough so that a poor student like me can get a really decent Indigo 2 for less than 800 bucks(and I bought my machine last august, and prices have even gone down since then...)
just thought I'd correct you a little bit. I really hate it when SGIs are considered too expensive--because they're not. Not if you consider you get IRIX(which in my opinion is way better than linux on the desktop), plus a 20 inch monitor, plus a really well made, cool looking machine.
mike
ah, no. it used an R3000--if you mean the SGI Indigo....
1)patents and copyrights are a mechanism in which helps owners of products and methods and such to inforce a contract.
2)the right to inforce a contract is a clause in the US Constitution(and also many other countries). While this idea of an enforcable contract was put in by very rich men, it in the long run has helped the general consumer. Why?
Because unless companies or individuals or even musical groups can protect their work, they will never even attempt the work. Medicines that require millions of dollars of research to perfect would never be invented. The computer you are typing your comment on would never have been invented. Even Open Source Software wouldn't be around if we did have computers(it depends on the ability to enforce a contract as well). Hell, you would never have even heard of Metallica--the company that has a record contract wouldn't exist, because 1) they couldn't enforce the contract they have with Metallica, and 2) they wouldn't have exclusive rights to distribute that music, so they couldn't make any money.
to say that copyrights or patents aren't good things is stupid. sure, there are instinces where patents or copyrights shouldn't have been granted, but to say that they are inherently bad for consumers isn't correct.
I don't think it would have to be that inefficient. It could be implemented efficiently by using keys.
all they would have to do is set it up so when joeblow saves a file, Windows RC5's it(or uses some other inexpensive one-way cipher). Then it looks for something with the same key value. If it finds something with the same value, it saves it as a symlink. If not, it saves it as a "real" file, and puts the key into the db that can be searched whenever another file is saved.
2) when joeblow opens a file, the OS just has to intervine and perform some type of test to see if the file is actually a symlink. if it is, find and return the real file. if not, just return the real file.
I don't think it would be that hard-or even that expensive.
As opposed to lacking creativity, and feeding off an unrealistic dream of gaming/Lara Croft sex adolation, this episode was poking fun at the sexually deprived 25 going on 14 year old gamers who get their jollies off of sillicone as well as silicon.
Chris Carter has done this in mode than one episode-for example, the COPS episode could easily be taken as a parody...they followed all the conventions of a COPS episode-hookers, topless skinny men, and the men wearing(without which no COPS episode would be complete) wife-beaters.
I think the one where Michael Milkin guest starred, where Mulder and His character switched bodies would also qualify as this type of episode.
This entire episode was just a parody of campy Xena/Japanese Animation/Married With Children(which I actually thought was funny sometimes..)/Natalie Portman/Britney Spears/Me so horney type of games/tv/music/movies.
As an owner of a MIPS-based sgi, I don't think sgi is for linux/open source as much as they'd like us to think. I believe this for several reasons-for one, even on their older mips based sgis, they don't seem to want linux(with a working X) to be running on them. Also, beyond Jesse and the kernel dump analyzer tool, nothing has come out of them. Secondly, As several people have pointed out, it really is kind of stupid for sgi to sell linux-based supercomputers(see the other posts to clarify).
I hate to say it, I think sgi is using Linux as a advertising thing...
for those who say that this demonstrates sgi's deep commitment to Linux, think twice...look at the status page, and you'll see that it hasn't been updated in months! So no progress in the MIPS version of Linux.
just a little rant and raving to make me feel better...I've been really frustrated with my IRIX box the last couple months :-(
What you are talking about is Amdahl's Law, which states that there is a upper bound for the speedup achievable by any parallel device, due to the inherently sequential nature of problems the machine is running...
so yes, there is some limit to the amount one problem/program can be parallelized(sp?). However, I suspect that each of those machines is running more than one simulation at one time, so overall they are each somewhat efficient in their use of the processors n'stuff
m'kay?